Historical Costuming and Cultural Context

I have a background in Medieval Studies, dance, and Medieval Literature. I currently live in Toronto. I like dresses best when they are heavy and/or have a lot of boning. I like designs best when they are complicated and involve careful attention to sequence. Working is bliss.

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I’m fascinated when I come across a creative, intelligent and well-written blog – especially when the subject is a bit off the beaten path and kinda eclectic! Fascinating mini-histories also. Added you to the roll :)

I’ve just stumbled across your blog. What a delight. I loved reading your thoughts on historical fashion and culture. I am a theatrical milliner and love the costume of the Edwardian era, the hats, the corsets and the gowns. I’ve just made a cup of tea and I’m getting comfortable because I’ll be reading much more of your writing today.
Thank you.

I think you’ll be hard pressed to find a good one for less than $200. Sorry!
Sewing is really not that hard at all, and I’m not kidding. It’s just basic procedures and engineering and such. All you need, really, to learn how to sew is a list. Before I begin a project, I start with a step by step list, and cross each element off as I get to it. The list changes a lot by the end, but its gets you started.
If you don’t mind the suggestion, buy a pattern for something small first, like a simple white petticoat, hoop skirt or bum pad, and try your hardest to make it absolutely PERFECT. Self-imposed deadlines also work. It won’t be perfect. Projects never are, but you learn so much more by striving for perfection than you do from starting off with the idea that you will be satisfied with something less.
Good luck!!!

Congratulations are officially extended! A co-worker has a very recent new-born, and he and wife actually use a rotating shift. Kindof weird, but they seem to be getting more sleep than one would anticipate.

Congrats on your baby, enjoy the family years they will go by before you know what happened.

Just compliments on your piece on the bustle.

I have been doing research on the extraordinary second bustle or shelf bustle fashion and find much of the analysis in academic and historical writing on the topic fits into either the doctrinal feminist camp, or the race discrimination camp, both preoccupied with what I find simplistic and flawed arguments and explanations.

The feminists focus on the physical restrictions and objectification of the fashionable woman as an object of male observation and ownership I find insulting to the women of the era.

The dictates of Parisian-based fashion, the importance of being fashionable as a matter of class status, the inter-generational involvement and financial demands of fashion (mothers dressing daughters, fathers called upon to fund clothing purchases not for practicality but fashionability) point to more complex explanations.

The race discrimination camp are preoccupied with the Hottentot Venus (Sarah Bittmann) and the outrageous display, dissection and preservation of her body. Although the physical parallels of the protruding buttocks and the fetishistic and erotic fascination with the buttocks do tie the two together, there is little explanation of why the second bustle period arose in the 1880’s, some 60 years following her death and display.

I suspect it was the lingering English sense of intellectual and artistic inferiority to French art and philosophy (the English claiming left brain dominance, teutonic thought, civil order vs the French right brain of intuition, disorder, artistic expression), that fostered the era of “fashion plate” magazines holding out French fashion dictates as the only yardstick of bourgeoise fashionability. And the structures of fashion in Paris and Versailles, the tens of thousands of skilled persons in the French fashion trade, its importance to the Paris community, having remained viable following the extreme splendors and expenses lavished on dress by the Court at Versailles in the prior century.

Looking to French political, class and economic circumstances may be more instructive in discovering the seed for what was an extraordinary and extreme fashion. I can’t help but think, as a parallel, of how Brigette Bardot a century later almost single-handedly dictated to the baby-boom generation a new yardstick of public sexuality with her bikini. And the dominance of French thought in fashion culture seems to continue.

Your noting the political situation in France I believe is exactly correct in attempting to discover and explain the true roots and meaning of the bustle, for during that era, once the fashion was adopted and worn in Paris, women in England and America desiring to signal their “fashionability” had little choice but to display the most current French fashion as presented.

As for the deeper meanings in the fashion and why it was adopted and popularized in Paris, there can be no doubt that some aspects of both practicality in movement, but also an increasingly provocative sexual display within the strictures of Victorian era respectability must have some bearing. Whether this was a display intended more for men, or for other women, and what social and economic circumstances might explain its rise and decline are fascinating topics.

Your blog is one of the more intelligent introductions to the topic I have seen. Bravo.

I’m also hoping you post again. I discovered your post after writing a novel about a young Italian needleworker who comes to America in the 1880s (When We Were Strangers/ HarperCollins, 2011) which plunged me into interest in Victorian fashion and the immigrants who did so much of the work. I love your elegant writing, your wonderful range of subjects and the look of this blog.
Pamela Schoenewaldthttp://www.PamelaSchoenewaldt.com

I strongly believe that i am directly descended from one of Katherine Swynford & John of Gaunt’s children. Do you know how I could establish this by any comparison DNA available today which may prove or disprove my link to this couple?
Ned Rustic

I have no clue. From what I undestand it’s a pretty hard thing to prove conclusively unless you are talking about an all male or all female descent. Some genes that are located close to each other will have more of a tendency to remain intact sequences, so it’s possible that one can have intact sequences from an ancestor who is quite a ways back. But it’s also possible, you could have none. There’s a significant probability that when you are researching that far back someone was dishonest, but usually aristocrats were often dishonest with other aristocrats, who were also offspring from aristocrats.
In general, though, if you can trace back an ancestor who was an English aristocrat, there is a good probability you can find a link to some Plantagenet. The English were fantastic at keeping records. And, Edward III, after all, did have 9 surviving children, all of which who had children.
So, I would guess that if you are part English, there’s a significant (though not huge chance) a smidgen of you is Plantagenet… though just a tiny smidgen.